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Conference – CASA Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital

By: admin_urbantick

20-04-2012

CASA is running a one day conference under the title CASA Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital. The title basically explains the aim of the event and besides a exciting line up of speakers with interesting projects there is also an exhibition with interactive installations.

Image by Dr George MacKerron / Pigeon Sim, how to navigate the flight icons.

As the Keynote speaker Professor Carlo Ratti, Director, Senseable City Lab, MIT is invited. Other speakers include: Professor Michael Batty, Chairman, CASA, Professor of Planning; Dr Andy Hudson-Smith, Director and Head of Department, CASA; CASA researchers including Richard Milton, Oliver O’Brien, Dr James Cheshire, Steven Gray, Dr George MacKerron, Dr Jon Reades, Dr Joan Serras and Dr Duncan Smith

Image by CASA / Conference flyer.

This event is supported by CASA research grants: ANALOGIES (EPSRC), COSMIC (ERA-NET), GENeSIS (ESRC) and TALISMAN (ESRC, NCRM).

The four main aspects of the conference are:
Find out about groundbreaking research being carried out at CASA, with talks covering crowd-sourcing and participatory mapping, sensing using social media and experience sampling, data dashboards, public transport, public bike schemes and more. Explore a brand new interactive exhibition, showcasing some of CASA’s latest models and maps. Meet and network with academic, public and private sector attendees during coffee breaks, a catered lunch, and an evening drinks reception. Find out more about the courses we offer at CASA.

The Programm can be found HERE. Registration is on http://casasmartcities.eventbrite.co.uk/. The Twitter hashtag for this conference is #casaconf.

The exhibition part will include some exciting experimental interactive media installations. In Pigeon Sim the visitor can fly around Google Earth, navigating by flapping the arms, there are simulations running interactively on touch tables and also the live London Dashboard installation is on display.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The 3D London NCL model.

Some of the Twitter work is on display too. The analogue Tweet-O-Meter, last on show at the British Library will be installed and a a 3D physical model of the London New City Landscape map will be on display. This model was layered from the contour lines and includes the labels and tag. With it some of the aNCL network clips will be on display, showing the connective aspects of the data. In these clips other cities than London will also be on show to extend on the perspective.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The 3D London NCL model.

Trendsmap Paints Twitter Maps

By: admin_urbantick

10-10-2011

Uncategorised

Twitter data is becoming a new rawmaterial for representing cities. Visualisations are being produced frequently. The latest addition comes from Trendsmap the online platform visualising emerging Twitter trends.

The guys have produced visualisations for a number of cities from around the world plotting locations of georeferenced tweets. The series is called Paint a City by Numbers and so far covers only a doyen places, but is poised to grow with Trendsmap having access to a lot of Twitter data through heir service.

Image taken from trendsmap / Painting the city of Melburne using geolocated tweets.

Image taken from trendsmap / Painting the city of Sydney using geolocated tweets.

These sort of maps we have seen already for examples in the work of Eric Fischer. Still it is always amazing as to how much detail the maps actually contain with streets completely covered. For example in the map painted of the area around Amsterdam in this example HERE, the main roads draw out in amazing detail.

However Trensdmap have added also specific features. One of the fascinating ones is the airport. Here on urbanTick we have pointed out a number of times how different urban features draw out specifically in the city fabric and the airports are definitely a special case.

The Trendsmap guys have plotted data for the area around the Atlanta International Airport and the resulting creepy crawly bug structure is amazing.

Image taken from trendsmap / Redrawing the airport of Atlanta ATL, actually the busiest airport in the world in 2011.

Image taken from trendsmap / Redrawing the international airport of San Francisco resembling the shape of a spider using geolocated Tweets.

Via GoogleEarthBlog.com

New City Landscape – Singapore – one Island

By: admin_urbantick

09-09-2011

Uncategorised

Singapore is an city state with about 5’076’700 inhabitant according to the 2010 census. The society is very technology interested and electronics make a lot of their business.

Digital elements have a strong presence in everyday life, including online social networking. In this sense it is not surprising that Twitter is very popular in Singapore. Also in terms of location sharing, users in Singapore are quite happy to share their location with the tweets. We have about 46% of location based messages. This is only matched by Amsterdam, NL and Lagos, NG. The average over all the locations observed is about 10-12%.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Singapore New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Singapore.

The virtual landscape redraws nicely the outline of the island state. There are the neighboring areas of Malaysia and Indonesia showing up at the top and the bottom respectively of the map. The connection across the water are also showing with tweets send either from a ferry crossing or from one of the two bridges. Beside these connection the international airport on the far most East corner of the island is probably even more important to connect to the outside. It features prominently in the landscape as a tall peak of high tweet activity.

Singapore New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Singapore New City Landscape Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity. Thanks for the naming help to Kai from 3rdlifekaidie.

Overall the virtual landscape beautifully redraws the outline of the island Singapore is on. The main features that immediately stand out in the Singapore NCL map are the areas message are absent. The large Nature Reserve in the centre is the larges area with reduced Twitter activity, but also the live firing area and reserve on the western side of the island. In line with the other observed urban areas, outdoor spaces show lower Twitter activity.

On the other hand the complete south coast of the island is abuzz with activity. Ranging from Changi International Airport in the East all the way past the container ports to the West tot he industrial areas. The main peak is Dhoby Gaut Peak in the area of the major interchange station on the MRT.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top, displayed as local time. Singapore is an evening city with a clear activity peak between 21h00 and 23h00. Mornings are very slow and it doesn’t really pick up until the late afternoon. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

The languages represented in the Singapore data set are clearly dominated by English and Indonesian. Those two languages cover about 90% of all messages. Interestingly the other few languages featuring are European rather than Asian. There is Dutch, Norwegian, Italian and Spanish, German and French. Also Esperanto again features, though only with for marginal number of tweets.

The platform is dominated by twitter for iPhone, followed by twitter for Blackberry, the web and tweetDeck. The iPhone seems very popular in Singapore. Also the iPad features on the tenth rank with twitter for iPad.

The temporal structure of Twitter activity is extremely focused on the evening. No other city has such a strong activity preference as Singapore shows. There is a clear peak between 9pm and 11pm. with a extreme drop of after 1am to nearly zero activity between 4am and 5am. This is followed by a sharp start in the morning around 8am. Through out the day this stays about leveled until it starts to rise in the late afternoon after 6pm.

RGS Annual Conference 2011

By: admin_urbantick

01-09-2011

Uncategorised

The Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2011 is under way this week in London. It opened yesterday under the topic The Geographical Imagination and is chaired by Stephen Daniels, University of Nottingham.
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As every year it is going to be a very big event with a lot of paralel sessions. I will be presenting some aspects of the twitter New City Landscape research. The presentation is part of the session organised by Ladan Cockshut of Durham University under the title “Getting lost on the way to Farmville“. Virtual, mobile and online spaces of interaction: Exploring the emerging geography and culture of new media technologies. The session starts at 09h00 and is located in the Skempton Building in Room 163 on the Imperial College campus.

The session has four presentations discussing the aspects of emerging social networking geographies. Two of the papers are based on gaming culture and the aspects of locality. One is presented by Kenneth Lim discussing Second Life and especially the SS Galaxy, a cruse ship. Lim’s interest for this part of Second Life stems from the view that a cruse ship is a self contained space providing all the essentials for living whilst on the move. There are of course very interesting connections to be drawn to the 1920 with Le Corbusier for example. He viewed the ocean liner at the ultimate city and admired its independence.

THe second gaming paper will be presented by Ladan Cockshut on Spatial and Interactive Dynamics in World of Warcraft. The third paper is by Amil Mohanan from UCL on the net neutrality debate discussing priotised datatransfer in the network by OFCOM and the possible emergence of a two-tiered market.

My paper is going o be the fourth contribution under the title New City Landscape – Mapping urban online spaces of interaction. The data for this paper is derived from the Twitter service, where users can send information as 140 character message. The platform allows to maintain a pool of followers (friends) with whom one shares the tweets (messages). Technically it is possible to collect every tweet sent via the open API (application programming interface) gaining access to millions of location based messages. From the collected data a new landscape based on density is generated. The features of this landscape of digital activity correspond directly with the physical location of their origin but at the same time represent with hills the peaks of locations from where a lot of messages are sent. The flanks and valleys stand for areas with lesser activity and vast plains and deserts of no tweets stretch across the townscapes. These New City Landscape maps (NCL) don’t represent any physical features, but the interaction with physical features on a temporal basis. The digital realm has become as much part of the urban environment as the physical features and with these tweetography maps they are made visible for the first time.

London aNCL

By: admin_urbantick

24-08-2011

Uncategorised

London was the first city we collected Twitter data for when we started to create the New City Landscape (NCL) project, monitoring location based Twitter activity in urban areas. This was back in May 2010 and since we have collected data for a lot more cities from around the world.

We have now finally also an animated NCL (aNCL) version using the same dataset. This part of the project was only developed earlier this year in collaboration with Anders Johansson at CASA and we are trying to catch up on the different cities we have data for. A series of aNCL visualisations has already been realised.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Showing four screenshots taken from the aNCL visualisation for a weeks worth of Tweets in and around London. The timings are midnight, morning, afternoon and evening. Each do is a tweet, re-tweets show a lin between sender and re-sender.

There are only very few features we are using for these visualisations. A characteristic landscape feature to roughly describe the urban area and the 30 km collection radius parameter to provide scale. Other than that there are only the individual Twitter messages that were collected over the period of one week. THe animation superimposes all seven days in to 24 hours.

With the visualisation we are highlighting the way information disseminates through re-tweeting of messages. An RT message will show a thin yellow line between original sender and re-sender. The information travels at some speed, which is based on the time it takes between sending and resending.

London, even though the data is already a year old is compared to other cities a very busy place in Twitter terms. We have a lot of individual messages, but more interesting there are quite a lot of different interactions happening simultaneously. Where as other cities don’t show a lot of interaction, in London the sharing of information is quite an important part of tweeting. An interactive, but static activity map can be found at London NCL.

Its great to see how London wakes up between 07h30 and 09h00 in the morning after a moderat night. Then there is however, not very much sharing at this point of the day. Only after lunch and especially later in the afternoon the sharing really starts in London. It is almost as if the city was to digest the information it had created earlier in the day, reprocessing it and passing it on.

Barcelona New City Landscape

By: admin_urbantick

22-07-2011

Uncategorised

Barcelona is in terms of twitter activity one of the cities that has a strong central core of high activity. Very similar to for example the London NCL or the Paris NCL maps.
The highest point is just over the Placa de Catalonia with a steep slope down la Rambla to the Roca Columbus. Other places of high activity are around the parliament, here the ‘Monte di Parliament Catalonia’ and around the Olympic centre on Montjuic.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Barcelona New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Barcelona.

The Barcelona New City Landscape map has already been published earlier, but it needed an update because of some problems in the processing and labeling. This new version also goes in line with the adjusted layout and design.

Thanks for the help with the map go to Narcis Sastre, who kindly worked it through.

Barcelona New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Barcelona New City Landscape Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

Barcelona is very active in the afternoon hours. There is a peak around 15h00, 18h00 and 21h00, after which it quickly drops off. The mornings are very pronounced right after six, however overall far less than the afternoon. Over lunch there is clearly a dip with lesser activity.

Spanish is clearly the dominating language, followed by English. Indonesian, French, Portuguese and Italian are sort of the runner ups. ALso Esperanto is there, this is surprisingly often present in the top ten list and it seems that a lot of people are using it as a statement, since it is not really a spoken language.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top, displayed as local time. Barcelona is a afternoon city with more activity between three and nine than through out the rest of the day. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

Also, we have the animation ready for the Barcelona data set. This one is put together in collaboration with Anders Johanson. The animation also shows the interaction between the users based on RT and @ tweets with thin yellow lines. This indicates a direction and provides a sense for the distribution of flows.

New City Landscape – Calgary

By: admin_urbantick

14-07-2011

Uncategorised

Calgary was established in 1875 as Fort Brisebois by the North-West Mounted Police, located at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers in what is now Calgary, Alberta. Today Calgary is the largest city in Alberta and directs an oil and gas empire, making a rather good situated urban centre.

The city is located similar to Denver at the transition zone between the prairie in the East and the Rocky Mountains in the West. This dominates the views and the impression of the place. However, unlike in Denver the tall mountains are further in the distance. The rockies in Alberta fade out in to the flat land with smaller hills.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Calgary New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Calgary.

The urban area is quite active on Twitter and the NCL map draws out the city features nicely. The main features are the airport, the downtown, the absent Nose Hill Park. Also the the main movement corridor the famous Calgary Y shape shows up on the map as a North West to South Centre connection with a North East connection via the airport.

Calgary New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Calgary New City Landscape Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

The main peak is over the downtown area as expected. The summit is right above the Scotia Centre building. This central mountain extends to the South West towards the Access Cliff and to the North East to the Highland Park Cliff.

Some of the missing areas are the Nose Hill Park which appears completely empty on the Twitter map with basically no activity. Also around the CPR the tweet desert spreads far, all the way down to the Bennett Forest.

Image taken from Wikimedia / Calgary as it appeared circa 1885.

The Y shaped sequence of hills connecting the downtown area to the outskirts follows the main transport arteries of Calgary, the C-Train.
This transport system is the core of public transport in Calgary and free in the Downtown area but extends beyond. It is accomplished by a bus network.

The City of Calgary is very much a morning city with quite a bit more tweets sent in the morning hours between eight and twelve. The afternoon is slow and the nights early, with the characteristic night dip starting before three and ending soon after four.

The dominating language is clearly English with other languages used on Twitter in this area being very low. For the platforms used the four dominating ones are Twitter for iPhone, Ueber Social, Twitter for Black Berry and the web.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top, displayed as local time. Calgary is a morning city with more activity between eight and twelve than through out the afternoon and evening. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

New City Landscape – Geneva

By: admin_urbantick

20-05-2011

Uncategorised

Geneva is the Swiss city with the most important international connections. In Geneva a lot of international organisations have a headquarter such as UNO, WHO, UNHCR, ILO, WIPO and the Red Cross. But there are also other institution of international significance based, such a the CERN or the World Wide Web Library.

This results in a very dense network of international connections and puts a rather small city on the world map. Geneva only has a population of some 190’000 people. This makes it the second largest city in Switzerland after Zuerich and before Basel and Bern.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Geneva New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Geneva.

Geneva is just like Basel another Swiss city located right at the border. Here it is the crossing between Switzerland and France. The map with a 30km radius then covers large areas of France too. It reaches right down to the French town of Annecy in the south.

The international flair in Geneva together with the beautiful scenery around the Lake of Geneva (Lac Leman) and the proximity to the mountains with great ski resorts also attracts high profile celebrities, who either live there or have a second home. For example Yoko Ono, Shania Twain or Phil Collins all live around the Lake Geneva. Also interesting there is a very special group of celebrities living in the area Michael Schumacher, Jacques Villeneuve, Jean Alesi, Alain Prost, David Coulthard and Fernando Alonso I wonder if they all go together for a spin around Lake Geneva once a week.

Geneva New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Geneva New City Landscape -Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

The very peak of the Geneva NCL is just above the Jet d’Eau the major Geneva landmark. It is located in the port out on a jetty shooting 500 litre of water per second 140 meter into the sky. It has been the symbol for the past 130 years.

In the main hill most of the international organisations are included. There are a number of tweets from UNO, WHO and so on just to the North East of the Jet d’Eau. The second peak next to the central one is around the international airport and the PalExpo in the area of Vernier. An then there is a sort of activity ridge along the north shore of the Lake Geneva, the locations most of the international celebrities live.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top, displayed in local time. Geneva is a night time city with more activity between midnight and four than through out the work day. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

Interestingly the data for Geneva shows a completely different time activity pattern than any of the urban areas looked at before. So far the activity over 24 hours always more or less fitted with the normal day activity pattern and showed the characteristic activity low between the early morning hours 3am – 4am. However Geneva has its activity peaks between 1am and 3am and overall the general activity high is between midnight and 6am.

Regarding the language English and Japanese are leading the table before French. Maybe this could explain the out of hour activity. Users are tweeting with and to different parts of the world during odd times, because of the different local times.

NCL Bern – Centres

By: admin_urbantick

09-05-2011

Uncategorised

The Capital of Switzerland is with a population of 131,000, the fourth most populous city in Switzerland. The wider area covered by the standard NCL 30km radius here is covering quite a lot of other centres, from Solothurn to Thun and from Murten to Langnau. As a sort of central landscape feature to it features the river Aare, exiting the Lake Thun, featuring in Bern, Lake Bienne and Solothurn.

Map by urbanTick for NCL / Basel New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Basel.

The activity peak in Bern is at the Bollwerk a part of the old fortification of the city. It is just next to the central train station. With its central location a very good transport connections, it is popular with offices and commercial uses. Another peak is in Buemplitz to the West of Bern. This is very much the suburbs of Bern, but very pretty suburbs with a touch of country life.

Bern New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Bern New City Landscape -Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

Bern is very much an after work, evening twitter user city. There is very little activity during the morning or even midday. Things only start happening later on. In terms of languages use, German is leading the tabel just before Indonesian and English. The other languages trail far behind the top three. Just about into the top ten slipped Esperanto as the user language.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity over the tweet activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top. Here we are showing Bern local time. Hence the characteristic dip between three and five o’clock in the morning. Bern is an after work evening city with more activity around the end of the work day. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

NCL Basel – Clusters

By: admin_urbantick

02-05-2011

Uncategorised

Basel, the city at the ‘Rheinknie’, marks the northern gateway to Switzerland. The ‘Dreiländereck’ (three country corner) is an important fix point in the port of Basel, where the borderlines of France, Germany and Switzerland touch. The resulting ‘trinational’ region with Basel as the largest hub has established its own culture and functions across borders both culturally and economically.

Basel is the largest city in this area with Mulhouse and St. Louis being the French and the German main city respectively. Basel offers a lot of work places for about 100’000 cross border commuters. A connecting feature throughout the region is the river Rhine. It marks the North-Eastern border of Switzerland coming from the ‘Bodensee’. In Basel this important landscape bends North, leaving Switzerland and continues to mark the boarder between France and Germany.

Right at this bend is where the Basel hub is located and obviously the river has historically been a very important source of identity and still continues to be. A lot of activity is happening along the waterline and this is then also reflected in the twitter map. The New City Landscape to some extend reflects the river and it can be read how it trails from the East side into the city and sharply turns North exiting between the French-German ‘gate’ at the Northern end of the NCL map.

Map by urbanTick for NCL / Basel New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Basel.

With a population of 166’173 residence it is in the international context a very small centre. Economically it is however rather important as a banking hub and is the home to very large international pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis and Roche. Nevertheless, the countryside around the city is completely missing from the NCL map. There are very little activity on twitter. The distinction between city and countryside in Switzerland is no loger very dramatic, since most of the rural landscape is urbanised to a high degree. The covered area of the NCL map must be the home to about 800’000 the twitter activity clusters on the city of Basel.

Image by Wladyslaw taken from Wikimedia / “Panorama Basel vom Martinsturm des Basler Münsters aus” (Panoramic view from one of the towers of the Basel Münster, with the Rhine bend and the Messeturm in the focus.

The highest point is the ‘Münsterstock’ probably the very most central location of the city, a hill overlooking the river Rhine right at the bend with the Basle Münster, a very attractive Church. From this central location the twitter activity trails out along the main infrastructure axis, Rhine, public transport along tram no 10, no 11 and no 6 as well as along the Motorway A2 and A3.

Basel New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Basel New City Landscape -Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

In terms of time of day twitter is active, Basel has strong morning and evening peaks. Also lunch is a time for tweetig as most people leave the work place for a lunch brake. The evening peak is very consistent between eight and ten, but then drops of rather quickly and stays very ow until it picks up the next morning around seven, the start of the next working day.

The language top three is Germa, English and French. Where English dominated the top ten in Zuerich, has Basel, with its proximity to Germany a very different position. However rank two reflects the importance of the international ties.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity over the tweet activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top. Here we are showing Basel local time. Hence the characteristic dip between three and five o’clock in the morning. Basel is a morning and afternoon city with more activity around start and end of the work day. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

— urbantick

Conference – CASA Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital

Trendsmap Paints Twitter Maps

New City Landscape – Singapore – one Island

London aNCL

Barcelona New City Landscape

New City Landscape – Calgary

New City Landscape – Geneva

NCL Bern – Centres

NCL Basel – Clusters

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